Abstract: Album of carte de visite portraits of political and public figures, probably from the 1860s, most published by E. Anthony
or E. and H.T. Anthony, 501 Broadway, New York, from photographic negatives by Mathew B. Brady's studio, Brady's National
Portrait Gallery.

Language: Finding aid is written in
English.

Repository:
University of California, Los Angeles. Library Special Collections.

Open for research. STORED OFF-SITE AT SRLF. Advance notice is required for access to the collection. Please contact UCLA Library
Special Collections for paging information.

Restrictions on Use and Reproduction

Property rights to the physical object belong to the UC Regents. Literary rights, including copyright, are retained by the
creators and their heirs. It is the responsibility of the researcher to determine who holds the copyright and pursue the copyright
owner or his or her heir for permission to publish where The UC Regents do not hold the copyright.

Preferred Citation

[Identification of item], Album of carte de visite portraits of 19th-century American political and literary figures (Collection
94/292). UCLA Library Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA.

Nineteenth-century American photographer, best known for his portraits and documentation of the American Civil War. Mathew
Brady came to New York as a young man of sixteen, worked as a jewelry case designer, and on the side studied photography with
various teachers, one of whom was the photography pioneer, Samuel F. B. Morse. He eventually established studios in New York
in 1844, and in Washington, D.C. in 1849, and began earning awards for his daguerreotype portraits, and later, his ambrotypes
and albumen prints. His studios did a brisk business in producing carte de visite portraits for soldiers about to go to the
front, as the Civil War broke out in 1861. Brady set out to document the war, and organized a staff of travelling photographers,
including Alexander and James Gardner, T. H. O'Sullivan, T. C. Roche, S. C. Chester, and David Knox, whom he sent out into
the field to record the people, places, and battles of the war. Despite his great achievments and prominent place in the history
of photography, Brady died alone and impoverished on Jan. 15, 1896.

Possible decade of production suggested by year that E. Anthony business moved to 501 Broadway, New York (May 1, 1860), and
year that his brother Henry T. Anthony joined him in business (1862), and firm became known as E. and H.T. Anthony.

Scope and Content

Album of carte de visite portraits of political and public figures, probably from the 1860s, most published by E. Anthony
or E. and H.T. Anthony, 501 Broadway, New York, from photographic negatives by Mathew B. Brady's studio, Brady's National
Portrait Gallery. Most of the portraits are politicians of the era--governors, and U.S. congressmen and senators, such as
Thomas Treadwell Davis, and Sidney T. Holmes, congressmen from New York; George Washington Morgan and Martin Welker, U.S.
representatives from Ohio; Thomas Hart Benton, U.S. senator from Missouri; Richard Yates, governor, congressman, and senator
from Illinois; John A. Nicholson, U.S. representative from Delaware; Roger A. Pryor, who served as Virginia's representative
in both the U.S. and Confederate Congresses; Thomas Corwin, U.S. minister to Mexico, and representative to the Ohio and U.S.
legislatures; and Henry Clay, who represented Kentucky in both House and Senate, and served as Secretary of State from 1825
to 1829. Other political figures include Salmon P. Chase, Secretary of the Treasury under Lincoln; and Thurlow Weed, newspaper
publisher, politician, and party boss, instrumental in the nominations of many American presidential candidates, including
Abraham Lincoln. Among the historians and literary figures represented are William Hickling Prescott, and John G. Nicolay,
private secretary and biographer of Lincoln; the poet James Russell Lowell, and writer Washington Irving. Other portraits
include those of Albert Pike, Confederate Army officer and influential Freemason; Samuel Osgood, Unitarian minister, and editor
of the influential Transcendental journal "The Western Messenger;" U.S. Supreme Court justice Joseph Story; newspaper publisher
and Western politician, Thomas Jefferson Dryer; and Matías Romero, Mexican minister to the U.S., and advisor to Porfirio Díaz.
There is also a photograph of Washington Irving's home, Sunnyside, a little stone mansion with stepped gables in Tarrytown,
N.Y. Although most of the photographs were published by the E. Anthony or E. and H.T. Anthony firms of New York City, at least
one bears label of "Geo. S. Tolman Fancy Goods Warehouse, Boston" pasted over the E. Anthony logo.

Indexing Terms

The following terms have been used to index the description of this collection in the library's online public access catalog.